Staring At The Light Read online

  Her eyes began at his over-large feet, travelled the length of him, taking in the red hands, the mask, absentmindedly forgotten and pushed up off his face like a misplaced party hat, and she smiled her gentle forgiveness of all his ineptitude, using her eyes to hold him still for one long, pitying moment before she swept past on her way to the door in a trail of Givenchy. There was laughter from the other side of the door; a murmured instruction, Keep him in order, won’t you? as if he was a prized, albeit delinquent, possession, loaned into the care of others until he was ready for collection at a later date.

  William moved to the window so that he could see her cross the road, three flights down. A swirl of olive-green cashmere cape, a quick look at her watch, the hand raised for the taxi, the dull gleam of her dark blonde hair, and all of a sudden he was overtaken by a feeling of sheer malice so intense it shook him rigid. The first thing she would know would be loosening of the back teeth, due to perishing of the bone. Then one or two would fall out; then more. Her face would sink; her lips would turn inward; she would scream at her own reflection. Rant and rave. Remedial treatment would be slow, expensive, unguaranteed, with the alternative of dentures to clack while she ate her delicate food.

  He wrote up her notes with a shaking hand. Never make personal comments in patients’ notes: all prejudice will turn upon you. That did not exclude lies. ‘Patient urged to have X-ray to monitor progress. Offered hygienist. REFUSED.’ Revenge, if conscience allowed it and she continued to encourage it, might indeed be as sweet as the caramels she ate.

  Tina sidled into the surgery and began the routine wipe-down clear-up routine between bums on the chair, her silence a mute expression of hostile curiosity. ‘You must still like each other,’ she ventured.

  ‘I don’t think that follows,’ William said dismissively. ‘I don’t think it follows at all.’ He was remembering the dream and the size of his feet. Seeing Isabella coming in the door with the two children who were not theirs, leading her little beauty parade of all his failures, the boy with the collapsed lung and the girl with the fangs.

  He would write her a letter about her periodontal disease: he would; he should. You are like the poorest patient I ever had, Isabella; it is only here such ignorance lurks, but ignorance in your case is wilful. You never wanted to know. And when the pen went to the paper, he would remember all she could have learned and all the times she had so obdurately refused to listen to anything that concerned him, and then he could not get over his unholy glee at the thought of Isabella and the shrinkage of the skull beneath her skin. May God forgive him.

  He tore off his gloves, scrubbed his hands vigorously, letting the pain bite. Perhaps if she married she would release him from the spell. William stared at her open notes, flicked from them an imaginary speck of dust.

  Notes. It was a myth that he knew all his current patients: it was a knack of reassurance that he could pretend that he did. There were few enough of his patients he knew, only some he remembered. The notes were impersonal: they rekindled memories of the teeth, not always of the face or the personality. He liked it that way. It was four in the afternoon, and the day, in his current state of emotional exhaustion, felt endless, as if it had never once been light, only as dark as it grew now. Rain drizzled against the window. One more to go. William saw the name on the page and began to smile. He looked at his notes about Cannon and blushed at the way he himself continued to ignore his own best advice about keeping them impersonal. ‘Nutty and delightful,’ he informed himself from his own prose, wondering at the same time if it was not a better description for chocolate. ‘Brave’: not a description he often found occasion to use. ‘Surly today; painting well’, would hardly give a clue to the man’s dental problems, but he had still included it. In the box on the first page, where he invariably wrote the name of the person who had referred the patient to him, it simply said, ‘Gaol’. William rushed out to the waiting room to embrace him. Cannon was one of his triumphs, one of his rare affections.

  Cannon sat, huddled into his evil coat, staring at a painting on the opposite wall, wagging a finger at it, measuring it with his eye, giving it the thumbs-up sign, lost in a dialogue that meant nothing to anyone else. It was one of many indefinable reasons why William liked him: their gestures and their nervous habits could have been those of cousins. The non sequiturs of their conversations made illogical sense. Cannon talked to paintings as if they were alive: he began each conversation with whatever it was on the top of his mind, scooping it into words like froth.

  ‘He’s got the fucking hands all wrong,’ Cannon said, jabbing his finger at the portrait as though rebuking it to improve. It was a portrait of a benign old man. ‘God bless the poor bastard. At least I’m not alone. Every bastard does it. You can paint the tits and the hips, but the hands and the mouth – total balls-up.’

  He stood, level with William’s chest, grasped his shoulders and gave him a big, smacking kiss on the chin. It was audible: Cannon could make a kiss echo from wall to wall and start a hundred rumours. The grin seemed to dislocate his jaw.

  William found himself returning it. ‘Why the hell have you made an appointment? No need.’

  Cannon was pulling a parcel out of a rucksack that had seen better days. The parcel was wrapped in tissue, secured with inordinate amounts of string. ‘Needed to talk, that’s all. Listen, I got business for you.’ His skin glowed clean; his coat smelled of earth and damp, a contrast to the pot-pourri, and William laughed for the first time in the day. After a time it felt like exercise, a relief for some hidden set of muscles, undetectable except through disuse. Cannon tore at the paper wrapping of his parcel. A painting.

  ‘What business? I’ve got plenty. I don’t need any more.’

  Cannon sat on the floor with his legs crossed, eyes on the painting propped against the sofa, mind in focus. ‘A tribe of nuns?’ he asked. ‘Gave up with the dentist years ago, costs too much, and one of the poor creatures grinds her teeth. So much for God, eh? I’m paying. Didn’t I say I’d see you right? And, while we’re at it, can you keep this for me? Only I haven’t got room for it at the minute.’

  A nude. William stared at it, transfixed. It brought light into the room. He stared at the painting and then at Cannon. There was a certain bond between one man and another if they had met behind prison walls, even if one was fresh from outside and the other a sulky, suspicious suicide-risk.

  ‘You just look after this for me, will you? And you’ll like the nuns, I promise. Oh, and when you phone up and offer your fantastic services, don’t mention all that cosmetic stuff, will you? They won’t want to know. And don’t say I asked you. Say … say Sarah Fortune put you in touch. She knows them too. Not too soon for a drink, is it?’

  William was never surprised about whom Sarah knew. After all, she had sent him to Cannon in prison and got Cannon round to him, just as she produced others of her peculiar clients to visit him in his more usual surroundings. By common consent, they went downstairs to the glory-hole. In his treatment Cannon had been allowed free range of the place, originally to keep him away from the staff and the respectable customers, then as a concession to a man who came with his own gaolers. Let him and his minders stretch their legs, fulfil their curiosity about how everything worked. Difficult to imagine Cannon being acquainted with nuns, but he looked like he needed charity. Faith and hope seemed in reasonable supply. William knew not to ask questions. The glory-hole suited them best. On the three occasions post-prison when he had come back, shyly, to chat, this was where they had sat.

  A dentist, and an artist who had given up making bombs and buildings: the contrast delighted William. He had minimal knowledge of the man and how he lived now, and did not need to know. Cannon asked for nothing, even brought his own whisky.

  ‘Christ, William,’ he remarked, looking round, admiring the mess. ‘This place is an arsenal, you know.’

  ‘I should tidy it up, I suppose.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. I like it here.’

&nb
sp; William admired the smile he had made.

  4

  BOOM, BOOM … CRASH. I’ll blow your house down …

  I’m going to do it now, Little Red Riding Hood … You’ll never get a penny from me …

  She woke with a short scream of surprise from a mid-afternoon doze. Day-dreaming, slipping into torpor, and all the images converged, crash. A woman in an exquisite red dress was orchestrating the demolition of a house, chanting through buck teeth the complaint of the divorce client whose file was on the desk and whose bleated fury stared from the printed page. He said he’d never give me a penny and he hasn’t … Nothing’s safe, not even houses …

  Sarah blinked and took a slug of cold tea, wishing it was gin, lit a cigarette, pushed away the deposition and retrieved the other papers, which had slid to the floor with the wakening crash. This was better. Given this kind of literature, she was anybody’s. Art catalogues were the picture-book stuff of speculation, but the particulars offered by property agencies held another kind of magic. They were made for dreamers. They were read by Sarah Fortune with all the fervour of a person who believes that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

  I want to inspect unoccupied properties, she had told the agents. I need to view them empty, so that I can see the possibility of myself living inside them without having to speak to an existing occupant and I don’t know what I want. Houses, apartments, whatever makes a home. Price range, madam? She shrugged her shoulders expansively. Depends on the house, the apartment, the street. They looked at her clothes and her air of confidence, sent her everything they had because she looked like a well-kept lady. There was the same assumption she had noticed before, namely that if a woman is well dressed she is automatically assumed to be intelligent, her mouth framed to speak perceptions beyond the normal range, as if a flair for visual self-enhancement were anything more than a knack. There were similar assumptions, she had thought, as she moved insouciantly from one prestigious property agency to the next, such as the idea that a painter with visual skills would be articulate, an actress interesting and a tart also a philosopher. Or that women were sisters under the skin.

  She was on the second sheaf of particulars when the word ‘sister’ came to mind, a memory purloined from the sheaf of glanced-at unanswered messages on her desk. Some were already redundant; half were asking her to account for her time, and Sarah rarely attempted the impossible. ‘… charming terraced house with small garden, lovingly maintained in quiet road …’ No. ‘… small, second-floor apartment overlooking green sward, near tube, small balconies …’ These could be the particulars of her own abode, reduced to a terse description and thus acquiring a kind of glamour, appearing to her own eyes exactly the kind of thing she was looking for. ‘… living room, 12’ × 12’; two bdrms, 12’ × 10’ and 8’ × 10’; bthrm, 10’ × 4’; ktchn, 6’ × 8’; use of lge gdn …’: what an odd shape it sounded, so impossible to visualize. She turned to the next. The text was compulsive reading: ‘Overlooks canal … huge recep! no mod cons! Ideal investment opportunity!’ And if it were, the market, with its best gambling instinct, would have absorbed it many months ago. Damp and empty, was what she read, and chewed her fingernails with a gentle, inquisitive motion as if they might provide interesting food. She had to be here, dropping tiny fragments of nail into the ashtray, rather than out there, on her way to the ideal investment opportunity, which was so ideal that no-one wanted it, the very thought of the thing creating a surge of excitement. More than a dress; more than a coat; more than a painting. This was real shopping.

  The phone rang. She could hear the background roar of traffic. Then a muted swearing; a muttering of formless, threatening syllables that sounded like obscenities – and might have been no more than the human sounds of a stranger struggling with a phone card in an unfamiliar place while besieged on the outside by aliens.

  ‘For God’s sake, is that you?’

  ‘It is, it is. What’s the matter?’

  ‘You’re always out, is the matter. I hate this phone card you gave us, is the matter. Can’t hear myself speak either. Mother of God …’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m stood with my head in a bubble in a place where a dog pees down the side of my habit and the world thinks I’m a freak. I need to see you. Soon.’

  ‘Yes. I think so too. I’ve got to look at a flat. Can you come? About six?’

  A chuckle; the sound of a kick. ‘Tell me where. I’m a sucker for a house, as long as it’s empty. I’ve got strips to tear off you. Things to ask. I’m out on errands.’

  Sarah looked round the office. Everything you ever wanted. She looked at the elegant frontage of the place advertised in the particulars as she recited the address. Everything you never had.

  ‘Why do you need it?’

  They stood outside a grey terrace in the dark, Sister Pauline and her niece Sarah, waiting for the agent. Pauline had a box with her containing her errand, which was a duvet. ‘For Imelda,’ she explained, as if such a luxury required explanation. ‘We have to spoil her to stop her grinding her teeth.’ The girl from the agency had a cold: she was immune to Sarah’s charm and jealous of her coat, and she was intimidated by the firm handshake of a nun with a face like a hatchet. She fumbled with keys and opened two doors leading into a raised ground-floor flat. From the windows at the front, the waters of Little Venice gleamed dully. The inner door was stiff, requiring a shove, first indication of the overpowering smell of damp. The girl shivered. ‘Why don’t you go and sit in your nice warm car?’ Pauline demanded.

  ‘I shouldn’t …’

  ‘You should. We might be a while.’

  She went, ungratefully. What did it matter? Twelve times she’d shown this place; no-one would buy before the spring.

  ‘Why would you need it?’ Pauline repeated. ‘All this space.’

  Sarah did not answer, drew her coat closer. The main room at the front was huge and echoey; the room behind half as large and darker. The walls were fifteen feet high with a cornice and a crumbling central rose from which there hung a solitary bulb, swaying in the draught from the door. Cold. There had been an ornate fireplace, untidily removed to leave a cavern in the wall and a black hearth. There were holes in the walls for the missing light fittings. The floor-covering was garish in the electric light, with big splodgy flowers. They moved through the wide hall into the kitchen. Grubby yellow units with gaping doors, gaps where the white goods might have stood. There were droppings in the corner; an acrid smell.

  ‘It was burgled,’ Sarah told her aunt conversationally. ‘The agent told me. The owner can’t be bothered to clean up or get it done, doesn’t seem to care. Puts a jinx on it for buyers.’

  The air of neglect was almost palpable: they could taste it and breathe it. Anything that might have given life to the rooms was gone. The width of the house was narrow; it was deep from front to back, with the kitchen and bedroom facing on to a back garden area. The rear rooms were meanly proportioned for their height: even in daylight, they would be dim.

  ‘I’d want to knock these walls down,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You have a penchant for knocking down walls,’ Pauline replied equably. ‘Now, will you tell me why you’ve dragged me along to look at this dump? And tell me what’s happening to Mr Cannon. I don’t care if that little girl out there perishes from frostbite. I’m not leaving this filthy place until I know … well … a lot more than I know now. Julie Smith’s been with us three months. I’m not sick of hiding her, but I need to know how long.’

  Sarah found herself suddenly defensive about the flat, as if by having elected to view it at all she had acquired a stake in its reputation. ‘It’s a glorious dump,’ she insisted. ‘Look at that front room. Give it money and care, it could be magnificent. I love faded grandeur. The bathroom’s OK, and as for the back, well, you could hide in it. No-one would know you were there.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Pauline. ‘I see. Distraction. Somewhere magnificent in which to hide. That’s w
hy you househunt. That’s why you’ve been house-hunting for a year. You’re a courtesan in pursuit of faded grandeur. Needing a new face some time soon. Or a new place to hold court. You can throw bread to ducks from the front. Or let them eat cake.’

  She swung her arms wide for warmth and folded them across her chest, tapped her feet against the cold of the kitchen floor; her long habit rustled and the beads rattled. Sarah took out her cigarettes, extracted one and proffered the packet in Pauline’s direction. Pauline took one greedily; they lit up in silence. Sarah heard a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Go ahead and bribe me,’ Pauline said. ‘It’s easy.’

  ‘I believe’, Sarah said, in the tones of a tour guide explaining the finer points of the museum, ‘that this flat, as part of this house, is owned by one John Smith, Julie’s brother-in-law. It has all the hallmarks of a Smith property. He buys them, sometimes lives in them, then moves on. Lets them to destructive tenants sometimes. He can’t quite bear to let them go. What is his can’t possibly belong to anyone else, or not for a long time. He doesn’t have the same sentimentality about office blocks, so he has plenty to indulge his little hobby. He won’t knowingly sell to a woman buyer, which restricts it a bit … and the price will be too high, which restricts it further. Smith puts them on the market and makes it impossible to sell. He’d rather let them rot.’

  Pauline was silent.

  ‘He sells in the end. When he’s besieged with offers and fed up with the game. When it’s so decayed its own architect wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘Sarah,’ Pauline said, ‘you are wasting my precious time. My God, it’s so cold, I should wear this thing.’ She kicked the duvet box. ‘Here we are, looking at a place you’re never intending to buy even if you could, and you’re telling me facts – interesting facts, I grant you – which do not really help me. At all.’

  Sarah stubbed the box with her toe, pushed it to one side. There was a sale sticker; Pauline could scent a bargain from the other side of the street.